During the last years, Xbox has focused on bringing its games to as many people as possible. Whether through Game Pass, the cloud, releases on other consoles, or on your own hardware. However, this approach has left out third-party developers, who have begun to question whether Xbox is worth supporting.
In a recent interview on his podcast, Chris Dring, director of GamesIndustry.biz, talked about his experience at the last edition of the Games Developers Conference, or GDC, where he had the opportunity to talk with multiple developers. Here, he revealed that many have expressed concern about the support that has been given to Xbox, since the low sales of the Series X|S mean that they do not sell as much on this platform as expected. This is what was said about it:
“The other thing I heard, I heard it from one very prominent company and one not so prominent, was that Xbox's performance in Europe is just stagnant.
You can follow our monthly coverage on the gaming market and you'll see that Xbox sales are falling, and they've been falling all of last year, and they're falling even more this year.
The quote from a major company that released a big game last year was, 'I don't know why we bother supporting it.'
We mentioned in a previous podcast that we had heard that stores in Europe are considering or had already been reducing Xbox stock on their shelves, hardware, games, that sort of thing; and now you have third-party publishers saying, 'We're putting a lot of effort into trying to create a Series S version and an X version of a game when, to be honest, for us the market is PC and PS5.
And with Xbox putting some of the games on PS5, from what I understand most of them will appear at some point, assuming it progresses like Xbox thinks it probably will, I think Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer, and that's what came out of GDC for me.
I thought it would be cool, but I didn't really take into account that some developers and publishers might just say, 'Yeah, I don't know, you know? Does it make any sense?' And that's when you can lose it.”
By the end of 2023, the PlayStation 5 sold twice as many consoles as the Xbox Series X|S. That same year, Xbox accepted having lost the current console war. These statements make it clear that, while Microsoft can accept its position and look for revenue elsewhere, third-party developers probably won't see this as a positive for them.
While it's still too early to see the results of this sentiment, this would not only mean that support for the Series but the third party offer on Xbox Game Pass could be substantially reducedsomething that would have a greater impact on Microsoft's income.
At the other extreme we have Sony. While there are no first party exclusives for the PS5 planned for the near future, titles like Helldivers II, Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade They have kept the users of this platform active. This makes it clear that the support of other companies is equally or more important than the jobs created by internal studios, something Xbox is failing at right now.
So far, we don't know of any company that no longer intends to not support Xbox. Titles like Grand Theft Auto 6 they will come to this consoleand in just a few weeks it will finally be available Final Fantasy XIV. On related topics, a new Series X|S control is leaked. Likewise, Phil Spencer talks about a portable Xbox.
Editor's Note:
A console cannot live on only first party exclusives. We have the Wii U as an example, low hardware sales caused third-party support to be almost non-existent, and if Microsoft has already given up on this battle, it is very likely that some studios do not see the point in continuing to release games on the Xbox Series. X|S.
Via: GamesIndustry.biz
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